by Holley Trent
“You’re not going to stop me?”
“Gods, no.” Mrs. Callahan put a hand on her bosom, appalled. “You’re not a prisoner here. You can come and go as you like, but you need to be careful. No one who’s from around here is gonna mess with you, but if you can’t recognize who’s who…”
“Right.” Lora got the gist. Mrs. Callahan didn’t need to belabor the point.
“If you need to go much farther than the farm, you let me know or one of my girls. We can drive you where you need to go. I’ll take you to your appointment tomorrow.”
“Thank you.”
Mrs. Callahan giggled and started for the door. “No problem. With you here, maybe we can finally get that bastard.”
“What bastard?”
Mrs. Callahan waved and said through the screen door. “Well. You’ll find out. I can tell you that he’s not what we’d call ‘good people’ around these parts.”
Lora went to the door and called after her as she climbed into her truck, “How do you know him? What did he do? And did I know about it? Was I complicit?”
The other woman paused with one booted foot on the running board, the other on the ground, and stared at a spot on the door. Lora didn’t think she was going to answer, but then she turned, took a deep breath, and said, “All I can tell you, honey, is that you’re innocent. You didn’t do anything except get born, you understand me?”
Lora didn’t understand, but she nodded anyway. Mrs. Callahan hadn’t given her much to work with, but at least she had a better idea of why she was there and where she was from.
New Mexico. Huh.
The mere process of repeating the words in her mind seemed to help her home in on memories she couldn’t quite access. She wondered if perhaps if she thought hard enough, she could dislodge them.
“Good. Now, go tidy up,” Mrs. Callahan called out. “I know you want to put things right where you want them. You’re real particular.”
“How do you know that?”
“’Cause me and my girl were the ones who went and got you.”
Lora opened her mouth but before she could get any words out, Mrs. Callahan wagged her finger and said, “Don’t ask about specifics. Those aren’t important now.”
Lora pinched her lips tightly together. She craved specifics, but she didn’t see where she had a choice. She shut her mouth, nodded, and waved good-bye.
CHAPTER SIX
Jody
“Jody!” came an urgent whisper behind him.
He stopped on the sidewalk just past the bakery and turned back. Marty Petersen was in the doorway and waving him over.
“I know you’re super busy, but can I have a minute? Mallory’s here, too.”
“Mallory?” Jody furrowed his brow and backtracked to the door. He’d been in a hurry to go visit the Mollers, but he always made time for the Petersen sisters. Not only were they new to the community and still trying to acclimate, but also, Mallory was his brother Keith’s home care nurse. Anyone who could deal with that surly asshole for five minutes—much less eight hours per day—deserved at least a sliver of Jody’s attention.
“What’s wrong?” He stepped into the bakery and let Marty guide him past the line and toward the back of the shop. Terry Holst, the mother of Marty’s partner Chris, owned the place. Holst’s made most of the bread and bakery products in Norseton, much to the chagrin of Dan Petersen. He’d banned Holst baked goods from the executive mansion, calling them “garbage carbohydrates.” The second shift cook, Adam Carbone’s wife, Lilith, sneaked them in during her on-days anyway.
“I’ll tell you in the back,” Marty murmured. She paused long enough at the counter to accept a Danish an employee awkwardly thrust out at her along with a cup of coffee, which she handed back to Jody. “You look like you need that.”
“Is there whiskey in it?”
She expelled a dry laugh. “No, but there’s probably some in the back.”
“I need it.”
She led him through the swinging half door into the kitchen. Back in the cramped bakery office, Mallory was sitting on the corner of the desk with her arms crossed.
Stepping inside, he saw that Erin Petersen was in the corner as well, seated on a low stool and nervously flicking the end of her blond braid.
Marty nudged him inside and closed the door. “A little cramped in here, but this room is telepath-proof.”
He grunted with appreciation. “Handy.”
“Mrs. Holst got the idea from your grandmother, apparently. It seems more and more people in Norseton are installing these things.”
“Which made me wonder,” Erin said, “if my…” Her cheek twitched and lips wobbled with unspoken words.
“Just call him Dan,” Mallory said. “For a while, we were calling him ‘That Asshole,’ but the kids caught on, so we had to clean up our language.”
Erin took a deep breath. “Okay. Dan. I was wondering if he might have one of these and if that explained why no one ever caught wind of some of the things he was up to. I mean, folks like you”—she gestured to Jody—“have a better than average ability to keep people out of your heads. The rest of us have to work really hard at it.”
“I don’t think Dan’s all that great of a psychic,” Mallory said. “I know I’m only half Afótama, but if I can tell that, I imagine that you and the rest of the royals can.”
Jody gave a slow nod and peeled back the lid on the coffee cup. Mallory wasn’t wrong about Dan’s abilities, but Jody hadn’t thought much of them before. Most people in Norseton didn’t have impressive skills in the arcane.
Marty splashed a finger of some clear alcohol into his cup.
He put the lid back on.
“I still have my house key,” Erin said grimly. “When I remembered that, I waited until I knew he was at the mansion and for my…” She cringed. “For her to leave the house. I let myself in and looked around. I found the room in the basement.”
“Shit. What else did you find?”
“Contact lists. I don’t know what any of the numbers are for, and they only had initials beside them.” She wedged her phone out of her pocket. “I took pictures of everything I could find and got the hell out of there. I figured you’d know what to do with them.”
“Send them to L—” Jody grimaced, catching himself. He’d been about to say “Send them to Lora” because Lora always knew how to triage information, but Lora wasn’t there. He had no clue where she was and had been hoping her parents did. Nan hadn’t had any luck getting useful information out of them, but he thought he might be able to.
“I know you’re super distracted right now,” Mallory said. “Keith said a few words about what happened earlier when I went over to make sure he’d taken his medication. I can’t imagine what would make Lora disappear like that.”
“We’ll find her.”
All three women nodded, but Erin did so with the most enthusiasm. “As soon as Tess has the baby, she’ll probably track her down in five minutes.”
“It won’t be that easy, I fear. Lora’s not Afótama.”
“No, but when Tess gets angry, she gets stuff done.”
Mallory, staring ahead at the blank wall across from her, wrung her hands. Marty was picking at the corner of her pastry. All three women seemed unusually pensive. That was normal for Marty who tended to keep her thoughts to herself in general, but Erin was a talker, and Mallory was the maternal sort who liked making people feel comfortable. She was always keenly aware of tension around her and did her best to squash it.
“What’s wrong?” Jody asked.
“Look, the timing is shitty, and I know it,” Mallory said. “As the oldest sister here, I’ll take the brunt of any fallout. It’s…him again.”
Jody took a long sip of his spiked coffee and put his back against the door. “Your brother.”
“Yes.”
Mallory and Marty had been feeling faint, familial tugs on the psychic web, and not from their father. Usually, a person of Afótama descent coul
d easily discern the level of relationship between them and a person they were connecting with. Parents felt one way. Children another. Lovers and spouses yet another. Siblings tended to be the strongest connection, likely because of their amount of genetic similarity. However, distance usually prevented their kind from having any extra-human connection to their kin. Jody didn’t like leaping to conclusions, but either their brother was a very strong psychic or his distress was simply so great that he was putting out a beacon signal unlike any they’d ever heard of before.
Jody grunted and made a go-on-tell-me gesture. There was no use bottling up the problem. Nan would find out and send him out to troubleshoot, anyway. That was his job—troubleshooting to free the chieftains up for more critical tasks in the community. “What’s wrong?”
“We get the sense that he’s wandering, and not in a productive way. He’s trying to figure out what this…” Mallory made a circular gesture around her head. “What this thing is.”
“I think he’s feeling a compulsion to move in this direction, toward Norseton,” Marty added.
Mallory nodded. “Yeah. That, too.”
Shit.
Jody let out a breath and rubbed the scruff on his chin. “Someone needs to go scoop him up. There’s no other option.” He really didn’t have time for the distraction, but the task was an important one. They needed to know if that man knew Dan and what the extent of their relationship was. He could have been a key to unlocking the whole mess with Dan.
Or just one more refugee from him.
Either way, the Afótama royals would never leave any of their people out in the wind if there was any chance at all they could be pulled back into the clan. They were stronger together, and the last thing they needed was for someone who didn’t know he was a witch to start coming into strange magic and not know what to do with it.
“I’m off from work for the next couple of days and I can go try to intercept him,” Marty said, “but the problem is that I don’t have the tracking abilities to be able to quickly home in on him. I’d be looking for a needle in a haystack.”
“No one has those abilities right now,” he said. “Not really. Uncle Joe and I do okay if we’re working together and with a boost from Nan. Tess has natural locating skills, and plus, because she’s the queen, she’s the default tracker here. Her pregnancy has her a little bit scrambled right now, though. Ótama might be able to help,” he considered, dragging a hand down his tired face. “However, she never leaves the community. She might be afraid to.”
“She is,” Mallory said. “She knows she’s not being logical, but she still thinks if she steps outside the perimeter, she’ll cease to exist. Still has her purgatory mindset, I guess.”
He grunted. “Other than her, I honestly suspect Keith’s predilection for tracking Afótama is a little stronger than mine, but him traveling is probably a bad idea right now.”
Mallory grimaced. “He could travel, but he’s going to be a pain in the ass. I’m sorry to say that about your brother, but—”
“But you work with him. Yeah. Of course he’s going to be a pain in the ass. He’s stubborn like our father was. What’s he doing this time?”
“Wheelchair abuse. He claims the seat is too narrow.”
The seat was fine. Jody had personally done the measurements for the custom chair, knowing full well Keith would likely gain a significant amount of weight. He had their father’s build, and Jody had guessed accurately. The width was perfect. Keith’s attitude was the problem. “I’ll talk to him.”
“Nah, don’t interfere. Asher was dealing with it. He seems to be the only one Keith doesn’t yell at lately.”
“That’s because Keith feels responsible for him.”
“And vice versa, I’m sure.”
For a number of years, and for different reasons, the two men had been marooned together on a small Cuban island. A downed tree had crippled Keith during a storm, and Asher kept him fed and reasonably sane in all that time. Asher was one of Norseton’s few fairies. He was an easygoing “young” man who always wore a smile and who did all he could to pitch in. He was grateful just to be accepted somewhere after enduring so many years of abuse in the fairy realm that he never dared to complain.
“Maybe…” Mallory furrowed her brow and drummed her fingertips against the sides of her arms. “If we took the van and let one of the wolf guards do the driving, I could get both Asher and Keith to come with me. Do you think that would be enough?”
“You’re looking for a sibling whom you can tell is moving closer. Your psychic impulses are probably better than anything Tess is working with right now. I think it’s worth a shot. I’d go, but—”
“Go find Lora,” Erin interjected. “It’s weird that she’s not here.”
She had no idea just how weird it was, but Jody chose to hold his tongue on the subject.
“Do me a favor and forward those images you took in Dan’s safe room to Nadia,” he said to Erin.
She nodded.
“She’ll get them to someone on the staff who can sort through them all. Does Will know you took them?”
Her suddenly guilty expression hinted at no. Erin’s boyfriend didn’t want her tangled up in the mess with her adoptive father any more than she needed to be. Like Chris did for Marty, Will tried his damnedest to be a buffer between his woman and her father, but Afótama women tended to have their own minds…for better or for worse.
Jody dragged his hand down his face again before taking another sip of his coffee. “When that shit blows up on you, I’m staying out of it.”
“He won’t get mad.” Erin’s comment sounded a lot like a question.
“So why didn’t you tell him?”
“Because he’s good at lecturing, and I always feel like I did something wrong.”
“He’s just trying to keep you out of trouble,” Mallory said.
“I know, but sometimes, it’s faster for me to get involved than to wait for other folks to get things done. Trust me, I want to work out this mess more than anyone. I’m tired of having that sharp feeling of betrayal hitting me every time I pass by Dan. I feel like a pawn. It’s tough feeling like your parents don’t really love you.”
“I think Mrs. Petersen loves you, Erin,” Marty said. “I wouldn’t say so if I didn’t mean it. You haven’t seen how that woman shadows you whenever there’s a public event in Norseton. She moves when you move so she can see you, I guess, and then leaves before you notice her. I didn’t want to tell you before now. As a mother myself, I felt kind of bad for her.”
Erin shifted her weight, obviously conflicted. “But she knew where I was from, and no matter how badly she wanted a child, she was a party to the crime.”
None of them could argue with that, and they didn’t try to.
Mallory slid off the desk. “I guess I’ll go coordinate Keith and Asher.”
“I’ll go with you,” Jody said. “I was going to talk to the Mollers, but I doubt now that I would learn any more from them than Nan did. I’ll debrief her more fully later.”
He gave his goodbyes to Erin and Marty and escorted Mallory through the bakery.
When they were out on the street and about a block away, Mallory put her hand around Jody’s wrist and said quietly without moving her lips. “I didn’t want to say anything in front of my sisters, but I thought you should know something.”
“About Keith?”
“No.” She grimaced and stepped off the curb to cross the street. “Although there’s plenty I can say about him, none of it’s important right now. I would have told you sooner, but it took a couple of hours after hearing about you and Lora for my memories to resurface. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but now I wonder.”
“What memories?”
“I’ve got expensive kids, so I sometimes pick up on-call hours at the Norseton clinic. You know, subbing when the staff nurses call in sick or whatever?”
“Gotcha. I take it you found out something?”
“Well—” She stopped talking as a couple passed them at the corner. She could have switched to telepathy, but in their community, that was often just as easy to eavesdrop on—especially for unpracticed psychics like Marty and Mallory. Glancing over her shoulder before continuing, she said, “I saw Lora there on at least two occasions, and she was coming out of the midwife’s office.”
After a few more strides, Jody came to a precipitous halt.
Midwife.
Midwives meant babies, and Lora would have had no reason to go there, unless…
He turned on his heel in a hurry intending to jog to the clinic. If he’d gotten her pregnant and she’d just up and left, he didn’t know what he would fucking do. As it was, he didn’t know what he was doing.
Mallory tugged him back the way he was going. “Lora visiting a midwife doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”
“But you obviously jumped to the same conclusion I just did. She’s pregnant.”
Mallory was quiet again until they’d passed the wolves at the mansion entryway and were on their way up the private staircase. “Is it possible that she is?”
“She’s always been on birth control.”
“As far as you know.”
He shrugged at that. It had always been her choice and she’d never been anything but cautious.
“So, on your end—”
“No, I never used anything. If she’s pregnant…” He thrust the door open and spat, “Fuck. Why did she do this?”
“Um, the pregnancy tango requires two partners, bud.”
“Not that,” he growled. “I don’t mind if there’s a baby. Everyone will be thrilled. Fuck, I’m thrilled.” He supposed that was what bubbling feeling deep down inside was, but it was difficult to tell through his apprehension and anger. “If that baby is a girl, her fate is already set. She’s going to be a companion to my niece in the same way Nadia is for Tess. The queen’s shadow is almost always the female relative who’s closest in age. It’d be an honor for her.”
“Maybe so, but could that be why Lora left? Could it be that isn’t what Lora would want for her child?”
